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The Motivation
One of the most difficult forms of documentation that nurses must fulfill during the care of their patients are the medicines administered through methods like IV drip. They work slowly over long periods of time as the patient rests, tasking the nurse with the responsibility of taking careful measurements of these treatments in addition to their other activities.
Drugs like heparin act as a crucial blood thinner that many patients rely on, but an overdose of the medicine causes potentially fatal bleeding. In this case, the pharmacy must order a specific amount of protamine sulfate to counteract the influence of the heparin. When there may be up to four or five of these patients undergoing treatment at the same time, mistakes occur too frequently. From incorrectly accounting for changes in administration rates to misrepresenting the dosages given to the patient, there are numerous ways for the human-side domain of medicinal informatics to fail.
CareFlow Connect
Our application is a conceptual integration between existing medical records systems like Epic and proposes an automated way for nurses to keep track of the heparin dripped to the patient over significantly longer periods. By scanning a patient's barcode, users create a new patient profile in our app uniquely associated with their identification number. From there, they are able to input the rate of which the drug flows in the IV drip in their given units per hour. This choice to make the units of flow unspecific mitigates the risk of converting incorrectly by abstracting them. As the patient receives their treatment, the user can start, stop, and reset the total time or change the given flow rate, which is reflected in real-time through a heparin tracker that increments as the patient receives more of the medicine. Although the application doesn't send this data to any institution, the metrics gathered are intended to be shared with pharmacies in order to prepare an emergency dose of protamine in case of a heparin overdose. Users are able to open as many patient profiles through the app as they require, and the treatment trackers continue to run in the background.
Our Methodology
We relied on the Expo App framework to collaborate in creating the project in Javascript and React. All relevant modules and methods were sourced from the standard options presented to us with the language. Each page is linked through a stack route that dynamically tracks the intended patient treatment.
Challenges
Understanding the nature of React through linking global variables across multiple app pages was difficult, especially when most functions are called in some tag and would therefore not be able to be mapped onto a variable. Everything was new to our group, since we had no experience in app development at all. Being able to research efficient methods to realize our goals was a notable group effort.
The W
Prior to the beginning of this project, none of our team members had any experience in app development. We were not familiar with neither Javascript nor React, and spending time on the project allowed us to learn their syntax from scratch. We're especially proud of our ability to pick up an entirely new realm of development in the span of our 24 hours and create a minimum viable product showcasing a necessary supplement to nursing documentation.
The Next Steps
In order to make our application more accessible to professionals in the medical field, we would work with existing documentation platforms such as Epic and adapt our code to fit for such frameworks. By connecting our project with other innovations like Smart IVs, we provide a substantial additional way for nurses to track the distribution of these crucial medicines. We're considering expanding the patient profile to include more demographical information such as age, blood type, and arm used in treatment. From there, we can include the tracking of more types of treatments to make the application more holistic.
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